Robert Liddell was an English literary critic, biographer, novelist, travel writer and poet. He was born in Tunbridge Wells

Royal Tunbridge Wells

Royal Tunbridge Wells is a town in west Kent, England, about south-east of central London by road, by rail. The town is close to the border of the county of East Sussex...

, England, and educated at Haileybury School and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Corpus Christi College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom...

. During the years 1933 to 1938 he was employed at the Bodleian Library

Bodleian Library

The Bodleian Library , the main research library of the University of Oxford, is one of the oldest libraries in Europe, and in Britain is second in size only to the British Library...

 as an assistant in the Department of Western Manuscripts. Liddell then lived briefly in Athens, Greece, working as a lecturer for the British Council. During the years 1941 to 1951 he was a lecturer at the Universities of Cairo and Alexandria. From 1953 to 1972 he was employed by the University of Athens, serving for part of the time as head of the English Department. He never returned to England, and died in Athens in 1992.

While at Oxford he met the novelist Barbara Pym

Barbara Pym

Barbara Mary Crampton Pym was an English novelist. In 1977 her career was revived when two prominent writers, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century...

. The character of Dr. Nicholas Parnell in Pym's novel Some Tame Gazelle

Some Tame Gazelle

Some Tame Gazelle is Barbara Pym's début novel, first published in 1950. It is considered a remarkable first novel, because of the way in which the youthful Pym - who began the book while a student at Oxford before World War II - imagined herself into the situation of a middle-aged spinster,...

was inspired by Liddell. During World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 he was one of the Cairo poets

Cairo poets

The British Army presence in Egypt in World War II had, as a side effect, the concentration of a group of Cairo poets. There had in fact been a noticeable literary group in Cairo before the war in North Africa broke out, including university academics. Possibly as a reflection of that, there were...

.

Works

• The Almond Tree (1938)
• Kind Relations (1939)
• The Gentillons (????)
• Watering-place (1945)
• A Treatise on the Novel (1947)
• The Last Enchantments (1949)
• Unreal City (1952)
• Some Principles Of Fiction (1953)
• Aegean Greece (1954)
• The Novels of I Compton-Burnett (1955)
• Byzantium and Istanbul (1956)
• The Morea (1958)
• The Rivers of Babylon (1959)
• Old and New Athens by Demetrios Sicilianos (1960) translator
• The Novels of Jane Austen
  Jane Austen
  Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Austen lived...
  
   (1963)
• Mainland Greece (1965)
• The Deep End (1968) novel
• Stepsons (1969) novel
• Cavafy (1974) biography
• The Novels of George Eliot
  George Eliot
  Mary Anne Evans , better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era...
  
   (1977)
• Elizabeth & Ivy (1986)
• The Aunts (1987)
• The Abbe Trigrane by Ferdinand Fabre (1988) translator
• Mind at ease: Barbara Pym and her novels (1989)
• Twin Spirits: The Novels of Emily and Anne Brontë
  Brontë
  The Brontës were a nineteenth-century literary family associated with Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. The sisters, Charlotte , Emily , and Anne , are well-known as poets and novelists...
  
  (1990)
• Kind Relations (1994)